Category Archives: Privacy

From the Orlando Sentinal is this report about police abusing the FL DMV database. The is more about it at the Reason blog.

Government databases will always be abused. That’s the nature of man and there is no use fighting it. Which is why massive government databases should not be created to begin with, unless there is no alternative.

There is an old saying that when you sit down to a poker game if you can’t spot the rube, you’re the rube.

Given the recent news that Instagram has announced that they now have the rights to sell your photos, perhaps that should be good advice for online services. Here is a good hint; if you aren’t paying for a service, then at a minimum you aren’t a “customer”. Oh the service has customers all right, you’re just not in their number.

Google’s new privacy policy is generating a lot of discussion. The controversial part is that Google is going to cross reference the data it collects on different services for the purpose of tweaking the ads and search results you see.

The creeps a lot of people out. What creeps them out even more is that you can’t opt out.

Of course there is always my way out… (cue lightning flash and creepy James Earl Jone laugh).

Seriously though, don’t use Google services exclusively. Use Bing instead of Google for searching. Use Yahoo instead of GMail. Buy an iPhone, or if you want an Android phone, create a new email account just for phone use. Use Facebook instead of Google+.

If you give one company all your data what do you think they are going to do with it?

You ultimately have control over this in your choice of providers. You can opt out by switching.

This is a wonderful story about the hacking of Marconi’s wireless system in 1903. Marconi touted the security of his system based on a tight (and presumably not publicly disclosed) frequency bandwidth. Of course it was hacked in a public and humiliating fashion.

This story about how the TSA not only searched a woman’s bags, but also went through her check book and receipts is quite infuriating (but not really surprising). The USA flying situation has already degraded into a farcical mix of incompetence and fascism that could only be surpassed by the society in Terry Gilliam’s classic “Brazil”. And I’m not sure it surpasses it by all that much.

And we all will soon get to experience the electronic equivalent of a strip search once they roll out the new body scanners.

The worst part of all this is that the TSA’s policy seems to be that if you react with anything other than meek acceptance they will call the police. The consistent code words are “elevated behavior”.

If your behavior isn’t elevated after interacting with the TSA, there’s something wrong with you. If only we would wake up and fire the lot of them.

Tim Cole has an interesting post about the need for a “forgetful” internet. A place where embarrassing pictures don’t haunt you for life. A place where there is no permanent record. A place where all sins are eventual forgiven and forgotten.

Such a place does not now exist. Unfortunately the search for such a forgetful paradisio leads instead to the inferno of government control. For if the government can tell you how long you can leave something online, they can also tell you not to put it online to begin with. And they will.